Google Helps Books Grown Digital Wings with New eBooks*

Google has helped books shed their paper and grow digital wings (read more about that here, here, and here).
This month marks the first page in a new chapter of Google’s mission to improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we know as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles. Purchase the latest bestsellers or catch up on the classics like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Gulliver’s Travels for free.


Google eBooks are designed to be open meaning many devices are compatible with Google eBooks—everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. In addition to a full-featured web reader, free apps for Android and Apple devices will make it possible to shop and read on the go. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your eBooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa—using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage.

Just think what this means for education in general and libraries in particular! For the visual learners out there, this video will help clarify.



Most books also enable you to annotate, select font, font size, day/night reading mode and line spacing suits you—and use a virtual bookmark to pick up on the page where you left off when switching devices.

You can discover and buy new ebooks from the Google eBookstore or get them from independent bookseller partners and participating members of the American Booksellers Association. You can choose where to buy your ebooks like you choose where to buy your print books, and keep them all on the same bookshelf regardless of where you got them.

When Google Books first launched in 2004, they set out to make the information stored in the world’s books accessible and useful online. Since then, they’ve digitized more than 15 million books from more than 35,000 publishers, more than 40 libraries, and more than 100 countries in more than 400 languages. This deep repository of knowledge and culture will continue to be searchable through Google Books search in the research section alongside the ebookstore.

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Note: This post was slightly adapted and taken from the Google blog here.